On 2/2/07, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 08:16:08PM -0500, The Editor wrote:
> > On 2/1/07, Neil Herber (nospam) <nospam at eton.ca> wrote:
> > > Someone made the comment earlier that they expected to see notation
> > > something like Animals/Canine/Small/Black, and I agree with that
> > > sentiment. Animals-Canine-Small/Black just looks wrong to me.
> >
> > The separator can be set to anything, "/" or "." , and it could
> > *perhaps* be rewritten to use any of the three options... However, I
> > fear using one or the other of / or . would cause other problems, in
> > that PmWiki *might* have problems recognizing the last part is a page
> > name, and the other parts are collectively the page group.
>> Not only could it cause issues for PmWiki, but people would often
> be confused by it as well. Consider the urls:
>>http://www.example.com/wiki/Animals>http://www.example.com/wiki/Animals/Canine>http://www.example.com/wiki/Animals/Canine/Small>> It's pretty clear that the first one refers to Animals.HomePage .
> But what about the second... is it referring to the Canine
> page in the Animals group (i.e., Animals.Canine), or is it
> referring to the home page of the group that has 'Small'
> (Animals-Canine.HomePage)? How would one distinguish the two?
>> This problem continues ad-infinitum, does
>http://www.example.com/wiki/Animals/Canine/Small refer to a page
> (Animals-Canine.Small) or a group (Animals-Canine-Small.HomePage)?
True, this is one reason I did not take that syntax approach in Hg.
Not to mention other related abmiguity problems you have discussed in
the past on this topic... (Another reason is I had no clue how to do
it another way!). I was just wondering if there might be an easy way
to accommodate those who do desire that syntax (as several recent
posts indicate).
My thinking was, if just perhaps the last item could *always* refer to
a page name, and a / or . could be used without problems in PmWiki you
could have something closer to what is sought. Of course, under the
surface it would still be Group.Name. Just appearances.
I am sure PmWiki could be made to convert a url to Group-Group.Name
from whatever syntax was chosen, though that might require a core
change or two (how does cleanurls do it?). Admittedly this would not
solve the underlying issue of pages being both a group and a name, and
it could therefore, lead to confusion for some.
(Specifically Animals/Canine/Dog would have the properties of
Animals/Canine and not the properties of Animals/Canine/Dog which is
what you might want if you saw it as the homepage for that group, ie,
it should look like Animals/Canine/Dog/Small and
Animals/Canine/Dog/Large... But if that's the expectation, that two
could probably be worked out easily enough... A fairly small step...
But then what do you do if you want a Dog page in Canine? Using a
closing/ or . could indicate you add a HomePage to the end... That
might do it...)
Personally, Hg accomplishes the goals I have at present, so I am happy
with it as is (I hide my ugly urls in a frame)--though I'm open to
improvements... On the other hand, I would be interested in seeing if
someone can suggest a problem Hg should be able to solve that this
recipe cannot (apart from notation). That is we might get better
progress shifting our focus towards finding a way to extend its
functionality further as Kathryn is doing with hierarhical pagelists,
and I'm doing with ZAP's new subgroup stripping markup. IOW, is there
anything anyone wants that Hg cannot do?
Cheers,
Dan